


the ugly truth

by luciimariiellii



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, vanya learning to live in the real world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 15:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19890229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luciimariiellii/pseuds/luciimariiellii
Summary: Vanya moves out at eighteen, and the realization of just how awful her father treated her hits her like a train.(Or, a look at the little ways Vanya is affected by Reginald’s abuse.)





	the ugly truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shoelaces](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoelaces/gifts).



> wrote this in like an hour so don’t @ me if it’s shit, was just feeling emo (but thanks for reading ily)
> 
> also @ tabby YES it’s late but ily happy birthday

It takes eighteen years of hell for Vanya to realize just how much her father fucked her up. 

She knows, has known for years, that there is something  _ wrong  _ with the way the Hargreeves children were raised. Something wrong outside of the  _ unconventional  _ she’d always known it was - life is bound to be unconventional when you live in a family of superheroes. 

But the - the  _ wrongness,  _ the absolutely terrible, horrible things her father did, don’t hit her until she is eighteen, learning to live on her own. Learning to live in the real world. 

Because she is eighteen, and she is stepping into an apartment she has never seen before, with the intention to live there for the rest of her life, probably.

Her father bought it for her, eager to get her out of the Academy. She’s never seen it, before today. He didn’t even ask the basics of what she would like - what floor of the building, guest bedroom or no guest bedroom, how many windows - and Vanya didn’t question that. That’s normal. Why would he ask for her opinion?

That is, until she offhandedly mentions the fact that she is moving to a girl in her violin class while they make small talk. The girl asks her how she likes her new apartment, and when Vanya says  _ I’ve never seen it, my dad bought it for me,  _ the girl looks appalled. 

That had been some kind of ugly beast, baring its fangs at Vanya after years of quiet threats; She’d always known something was wrong. Now it’s staring her right in the face. Now she’s realizing that there’s something  _ not right  _ about how she was raised.

Reginald’s isolation of his children, Vanya slowly comes to realize, was perfect in that they never had anything to compare their home life to. They were raised to believe that how they lived was, if not entirely like most people’s, okay. That being locked in your bedroom for a week, or made to go to bed without dinner, or slapped across the face for not standing straight enough, was  _ okay.  _

That violin class is only the beginning of Vanya’s quiet wake up call. 

She’ll be standing in the supermarket aisle, her air coming in short, ragged breaths because  _ so many choices how do I choose which one do I choose what if I mess it up -  _ and she realizes that most people do not have panic attacks over which brand of soup they should get. So she tries to calm herself down and takes her time picking out her soup, then milk, then coffee, then bread, and so on and so forth until she is leaving just as a disgruntled employee slams the door shut behind her at closing time. 

Or, she’ll be making awkward, pained small talk with others in her violin class. (She’s hoping, soon, she’ll make it into the orchestra. Auditions are next month. Fingers crossed!) The topic of families will come up, and she’ll get to hear all about weekends with dad, childhood memories of playing with siblings. Then, someone will always,  _ always,  _ remember who Vanya is - or rather, who her family is - and her classmates will turn to her expectantly, because of course, she grew up with  _ superheroes,  _ she  _ must  _ have some awesome stories, huh?

But the truth is, weekends with dad were not for her - they were long missions she was not privy to that her siblings returned from exhausted and injured. Playing with siblings meant watching the others play from the sidelines, unless, on rare occasions, Klaus or Ben invited her over to join them and the others awkwardly tolerated her presence. 

She doesn’t tell her classmates this. She just chuckles, painfully, and tells them a silly anecdote about something Klaus did. The fact that he was high or drunk or both because of an awful mix of his own powers and his father’s abuse is conveniently left out. 

Or, she’ll be waking up in the middle of the night to police sirens in the distance, and her first thought will be,  _ get dressed, get the first aid kit, get in the car, it’s a mission, where’s klaus, is he still in the house or did he sneak out last night, find ben’s mask, he always loses it-  _ before she realizes there is no mission. There is no Umbrella Academy, unless you count Luther, trotting around on his own like a sad horse. 

Or, she’ll do something wrong, maybe bump into a stranger on the street or be a couple dollars short on the amount she needs for her groceries, and her first thought is,  _ please don’t hit me. _

And there are a million other things, too - she peers around every corner before she walks around it, she flinches when anyone raises their voice, she can’t handle elevators or small rooms, she talks out loud to herself as she walks around her house just because she  _ can,  _ just because no one can  _ stop her,  _ no one can make fun of her, she is  _ free _ .

That isn’t to say she doesn’t miss her siblings, for all the hell they put her through.

Okay, that’s not fair on them. Reginald groomed them to be like that, he put it in their heads that Vanya was the weak one, the ordinary one, the boring one, the one they didn’t need to pay any attention to. 

So, yeah, she may resent them just a _ tad bit.  _ But she can’t be too angry. And, hell, she misses them. 

And as she curls up into a ball after her first time in a movie theater, sobbing on her apartment floor halfway under the coffee table, she hopes her still living siblings are doing better than her. (In Klaus’s case, she hopes he’s still alive.) Even if, deep down, she knows they’re all just different shades of fucked up.

**Author's Note:**

> lmk if u enjoyed!! please leave a kudos and a comment and lmk what u did or didn’t like :)
> 
> scream at me on tumblr @luciimarii


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